5 Minutes with... Sharon Whale
You can’t tell the story of the past decade of agency in-housing without including OLIVER. As the world’s only agency that exclusively designs, builds, and runs bespoke in-house agencies and marketing ecosystems for brands, it’s unlike any other creative agency.
Sharon Whale is the deputy global group chief executive at OLIVER and the Inside Ideas Group, where she has played a crucial role in part of this story for more than six years, driving growth and success for the business. She has played an instrumental role in putting in-housing on the marketing map, championing the discipline as an effective way of working.
She’s part of a leadership team that delivers business growth, fame and purpose for over 300 clients in 48 countries and counting, The IIG group is part of The Brandtech Group (formerly You & Mr Jones).
Under Sharon’s leadership, OLIVER has fostered a "people first" culture, leading to the company being recognised as one of the top workplaces in the UK.
Before joining OLIVER, Sharon enjoyed a 13-year tenure at Proximity London, managing notable accounts such as Lloyds Banking Group, VWG, and The Economist. Her work with The Economist resulted in over 20 prestigious awards, including the DMA Grand Prix and a Lion at Cannes.
LBB’s Alex Reeves catches up with Sharon.
LBB> You started your career in direct marketing. What are your feelings about how that helped you to grow and learn, as opposed to those who've only worked in creative agencies?
Sharon> Well, I think our time has come! All the training we did around personalisation, customer loyalty journeys and touchpoints, on the value of data and insights to be drawn from it: these are all marketing tenets that are drummed into you as a direct marketer, and they are now essential for all businesses.
LBB> What were the most formative projects or clients for you in the earlier part of your career?
Sharon> You always remember your first, and for me, it was Sunsilk.
It was a brand on the wane at that time, and Unilever was interested in exploring what loyalty could do to drive sales. The result was one of the earliest loyalty programmes Unilever did. My agency created a year-long campaign where we recruited Sunsilk users and took them on a journey using direct mail with the ambition to increase sales and loyalty via tiered reward vouchers, cross-selling via samples and surprise and delight competitions.
It was the most brilliant learning curve that taught me crucial aspects of my profession – about the value of data, about personalisation. I learned about the customer journey through acquisition, and about retention and loyalty.
LBB> When you came to OLIVER in 2016, what were the priorities? And what have been the biggest changes since?
Sharon> OLIVER is the only company that was built from the ground up to design, build and run in-house agencies and marketing ecosystems for clients. At its most basic level, particularly when I started back in 2016, that meant embedding agency teams deeply inside the client's world. Which sounds really straightforward. Not so.
When I started, I hadn’t grasped just how complex that is to pull off successfully, not least from people, process, technology and culture perspectives. After all, how do you run many agency solutions (300 and counting) but with most of your people somewhere else? How do you match up the right talent to the right jobs in the right geographical locations with the right experience?
It took me time to understand that OLIVER’s expertise is grounded in building agencies and bespoke marketing solutions, providing the expertise that delivers the very best for our clients – what they need now and in the future, to drive both efficiency and business effectiveness. So, the priority was to literally deprogramme myself from going back to standard agency solutions and develop solutions that addressed what businesses need – not what agencies have to offer.
LBB> What have been the biggest leaps or challenges you've had to navigate since?
Sharon> In terms of current challenges, coming out of covid has been interesting. When we all went into lockdown, no one here missed a beat – it’s how our business is structured anyway, we were built to be remote already. The new hybrid norm means we didn't go back to being five days a week in anyone's office.
We’re navigating an additional layer of complexity where our people were in several locations, and on site, maybe two, three, or four days a week, following our client patterns. That puts a burden on our people systems, managing the new expectations of culture, and more flexible working patterns – is a challenge every leader is tussling with currently, with that additional level of complexity for us.
The other challenge is ongoing (and exciting): OLIVER is an exceptionally fast-growing, dynamic and entrepreneurial environment. Operationally, when you have 4,500 people globally and growing, there has to be a certain way of doing things, and yet you don’t want to stifle people.
Every time we reach a new level of growth, every time a new technology comes along, you’re reassessing whether what you have in place is fit for purpose – it’s never just once and done. For me, that’s where the excitement is.
LBB> What role has mentorship played in your life and what would be your advice for anyone who wants to get a mentor or become one?
Sharon> A mentor is a kind of catch-all – you don't have to be qualified in anything, it’s someone who can give you sound advice on particular issues or challenges that you have. So, I’ve had a few mentors and they’re super valuable if you're open to learning. In my first year at OLIVER, I spent a lot of time with my old CEO and my new one, talking through challenges and coming to terms with the fact that it’s not a weakness to know that you need help and advice. For me, that was a fundamental moment.
I've also had an executive coach for quite a lot of the time that I've been at OLIVER; that is a more official relationship and one that has made the single biggest difference to my abilities as a leader. She has made a huge difference in my confidence, my language, and my ability to believe I could be inspirational in how I lead.
I've mentored two people through the MBA program OLIVER runs and two people through our MSc. That’s really about being there for them, helping them identify things that they could do their projects on that would be useful to the business and to themselves. Encouraging them to believe in themselves and not give up.
I've also been a mentor at the Women's Association, where I mentored four young Black girls, helping them understand what they might be able to do in a career by giving them access to our business and doing an internship with them. The pay-it-forward mentality is really important, not just within our own bubbles of family and friends but also by opening up opportunities to those who wouldn’t otherwise have come across them. I find that very rewarding.
LBB> Can you talk about the breadth of what the Inside Ideas Group encompasses and what your main preoccupations are right now in your role as deputy global group chief executive?
Sharon> IIG in its totality is the perfect bull's eye between consultancy, marketing services and business process outsourcing. We create bespoke solutions, the breadth of which is enormous.
We can create a global solution across 20 markets for a global brand to deliver with the set-up of a global infrastructure, or we can set up a four-person team on-site to deliver business development collateral. But the fundamentals that underpin both those scenarios and everything in between are the same: we create bespoke solutions that are exactly right for a client’s needs, managing the people, the process, and the technology.
That encompasses offering highly relevant, ever better and more effective marketing solutions that drive our clients’ businesses.
My main focus now is managing that and providing leadership in what are globally turbulent times both economically and socio-politically.
LBB> You've been named Campaign's Female Frontier CEO of the Year as well as picking up the Creative Businesswoman of the Year award at the Great British Businesswoman's Awards. What have you recently been most proud of and why?
Sharon> I've been very proud of the way that the company has embraced diversity and inclusion; it’s an ongoing journey and we’re committed to it as a business.
I'm proud of the fact that we are open to moving people across our business into many different roles and the appointment of Amina Folarin, from global CPO to UK group CEO, is testament to that but equally we have talent like Paul Bonnette who joined as an account executive in the UK and is now CEO of our SEAPAC region.
And I'm super-proud of our creative reputation, and the fact that we’re winning Campaign Agency of the Year awards as well as Campaign BIGs, Cleos, Effies and our first Cannes shortlist! Around 70% of our staff come from some creative background, we know that creativity doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and they have career ambitions, so to be recognised for that is immense.
LBB> What is your biggest passion outside of work?
Sharon> Hilariously, during lockdown, I decided to take singing lessons and me being me, I had to take the exams as well so in the past couple of years, I've done my grade six and grade seven singing exams. That’s my creative outlet outside of work. Singing is so cathartic.
And also, you have to just not worry about being an idiot because I'm not the world's greatest singer! Putting yourself in positions that are deeply uncomfortable is good for continuous learning and self-growth.
